Last night's interview with renown cardiologist Pim van Lommel is considered worth listening to particularly for fledgling NDE researchers.

The first hour of the interview involved basically discussion of van Lommel's book titled " Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience" while the second final hour consisted of call-ins with questions as well as some reporting their own near death experience.

Below are some observations from my notes of the program:

- Doctor van Lommel cited lots of statistics derived from one of his studies based on 344 cardiac arrest cases. In addition, Doctor van Lommel stressed that NDE discussion is still verboten in the medical community (which includes medical institutions such as hospitals, medical schools and universities) along with treatment doctors themselves. Thus, it is not surprising that so many experiencers (eg, 50%), refuse to discuss their NDE.

- Doctor van Lommel cited as hallmarks of the NDE pretty much the classic features which most of us are familiar with such as the experience being described as "realer than real" along with after effects such as no longer fear of death as well as undergoing subsequent significant life changes typically as a result of changed values. Somewhat surprising was cited the commonality of meeting deceased relatives (and in some cases ones in which they did not know that the relative had already died), experiencing post NDE super rapid/miraculous healing of the source injury as well as reporting seeing/identifying events and/or objects in the immediate environment when the subject patient clearly was not registering any brain function.

- Regarding this latter phenomenon, Doctor van Lommel described his theory regarding the nature of consciousness which has been an outgrowth of his many years of experience as cardiologist. Mainly, that consciousness seems to be non-local (may be a fundamental property of the universe) and that the brain is better regarded as a receiver versus a sole source (or deriver) of consciousness. That a damaged brain simply does not allow proper translation/interpretation of the non-local source from which it is receiving.

- Call-ins who related their personal NDE along with questions which were being asked were interesting and worth listening to.

Below is the C2C program summary for the van Lommel interview.

Wednesday - May 10, 2017

Cardiologist Dr. Pim van Lommel revealed why he believes that near-death experiences are authentic and cannot be attributed to imagination. In 1969, one of van Lommel’s patients was brought back from a death by heart attack. He recalled that the patient was "very very disappointed" that they needed to return to life. In the mid-1980s, van Lommel began asking other patients about their experiences and decided that he would conduct a study of the phenomenon which culminated in a report which was published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet. The research created "a sensation." The patients with NDEs reported out of body experiences which were verified by objective observers, as well as "no fear of death, unconditional love for yourself and others, and a connection with everything and everybody." Many also felt that their near death state was "more real than life."

The transformation that occurs to people who experience a near-death state is often traumatic for others, as van Lommel said that 70% of the experiencers ended up getting divorced because their partners believe that the patient is "not the person they knew" before the event. According to his medical training, van Lommel was not supposed to think in terms of the human mind being able to process information when it was clinically dead, but his "scientific curiosity" allowed him to consider things which went against conventional wisdom. He now believes that our consciousness is not located in our brains, but is "non-local," that is we are more like receivers where our minds function as intermediaries between spirit and body. Based on his studies and conversations with countless patients, van Lommel has concluded that "dying is not the end of our consciousness." In the last hour, listeners called in with their own NDE reports.